Tuesday, January 19. 2010

Google Street View is a great resource from Google, but sometimes the pictures can be months or years out of date. This means that billboards in Street View are often outdated and different – until now. Google has filed a patent in the United States that would let them place their own ads – observably something similar to AdSense – over the old, real life billboards.

But these are the only uses that Google sees for these virtual adspaces. Part of the patient mentions an auction system, where advertisers could bid over the rights to place their ads over the top of old billboards. This could lead to legal issues – like a restaurant buying a prime billboard over a rival.

Of course, there is the legal issue of the billboard owners getting upset about Google making money on their billboards – but they don’t have a case. In 2002, the USA Today paid Sony Pictures Entertainment for placement in the Spider-Man movie. In the movie, when Spidey was swinging through Times Square, the film’s editors digitally removed a Samsung ad and turned it into a USA Today ad.

Samsung, the ad company, and the building’s owner sued Sony Pictures Entertainment, but a court ruled that it was legal. Billboards are big money, and Google will likely be sued by some enterprising billboard company – but they’ve got legal percent on their side.

Of course, this may never come out at all. A Google spokesman told the UK’s Telegraph: “We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t. Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications.”

Thursday, May 14. 2009

What are you doing on Friday night? If you don’t have other plans, you can tune in to a live broadcast of the public launch of Wolfram Alpha, the much-hyped search engine that we reviewed last week. The company will be live broadcasting its launch starting at 8pm ET using video streaming service Justin.tv.

Although we’re not yet convinced that Wolfram Alpha is going to be the search company to finally challenge Google, this launch strategy is a smart one – if all goes well. With Justin.tv’s integration of Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace into the chat window that accompanies each video, the launch stands to gain a tremendous amount of buzz across social media sites.

The Wolfram Alpha team tries to manage expectations in a blog post about the event, writing, “We can’t guarantee that everything will go smoothly. Indeed, we fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that you’ll find it interesting to join us as we work through these in real time. Perhaps you’ll even have some advice to share.” Once the webcast is completed, the company expects to push what it calls a computation knowledge engine out to everyone “within an hour or two.”

While Wolfram Alpha is patting their own back a bit for their very public launch (“we’ve been rather surprised that we haven’t been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all,” they write), other companies hoping to duplicate this strategy should note that the search engine is one of the most hyped new products this year, so attracting tons of viewers to your own webcast launch might not be so easy (assuming Wolfram Alpha’s assumption is right and people will watch a website launch on a Friday night).

In any event, Wolfram Alpha is near, and the reaction from real users will be exciting to watch given all the pre-launch hype.

There’s always an urge to declare a major new player in search as a “Google killer” because of its unique approach to the space, its celebrated founding team, or copious amounts of industry hype.

Wolfram Alpha has a bit of all of these elements working for it, though it’s significantly different than other recent attempts to dethrone Google, such as Cuil, which fell flat on its face on launch day, or Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft before ever really getting a chance to prove itself as a commercially viable product.

The first key thing to be aware of with Wolfram Alpha – the project of Stephen Wolfram, a noted physicist and mathematician – is that it’s not a search engine in the traditional sense. Its goal isn’t to index the Web and direct you to Web pages quickly, but rather, to make computations based on a rich database of historical knowledge.

What It Does

In checking out the private preview this week (the site is expected to launch later this month), the first question to come to mind was when exactly would I use this as opposed to Google? Most of my searches are navigational – I’m either looking for a specific type of website (travel, tickets, etc.), or researching a story that I’m working on for Mashable.

To answer this question, Wolfram Alpha has an “examples” section with about two dozen different sample uses of its technology. Some of these examples are really heady, academic stuff – like the calculus you probably don’t remember from college.

Others are more practical, like entering in “San Francisco to Tokyo” and getting data on how many miles apart they are, the projected flight path, and current local times. Meanwhile, if you ever wanted to know what time the sun rose and set on the day you were born, type in your birthday and Wolfram Alpha will tell you (and also let me know that I’m approaching my 10,000th day on earth!).

What It Doesn’t Do

While that is pretty cool, it’s not exactly something I’d need to use every day, nor something I could easily explain to typical Web users. Additionally, when trying more Google-like searches, like trying to find a Las Vegas hotel room, there doesn’t seem to be much that Wolfram Alpha can do to help. But, that also doesn’t really seem to be the point of Wolfram Alpha – at least for now.

Where It Fits

The real strength and power of Wolfram Alpha does seem to be for the academic and research community, where the company’s founder has been innovating for more than two decades. How well it works will ultimately come down to its ability to interpret user inputs (i.e. - the examples are impressive, but how well will it respond to the queries of real users?), and its ability to grow its database to perform more everyday tasks.

Ultimately, it’s hard to see how Wolfram Alpha could be called either the next Google or the next Cuil. Rather, it seems to have the ambition of making accessible a whole different type of information, that could be quite useful to a significant subset of Internet users. And eventually, that might make it a good compliment, but not a replacement, for today’s leading search engines.

fabric | rblg

This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.

We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.

Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.

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